A huge quantity of printed magazines, newspapers, and books are widely distributed in the traditional paper format. In addition to using lots of paper to manufacture these products, the distribution (i.e., shipping, transportation, and display) of books, magazines and newspapers consumes a lot of resources as well. The readers of many of these publications, such as newspapers and magazines, discard them shortly after the user is done reading them, thus adding to the burden of waste disposal.
With the increased growth and popularity of the Internet, many publishers have been turning to distributing their publications in alternate formats, such as in online format, and/or via media such as compact disk read only memories (CD-ROMS). With this technique, a user can instead read the publication on the screen of his or her personal computer (PC). At the present time, however, despite the availability of such publications, consumers have been slow to accept reading from a computer screen. In response to the lukewarm response by consumers, makers of personal digital assistants (PDA) devices such as the Palm IV (available from Palm, Inc., 5470 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, Calif.) and of electronic books (E-books) such as the ROCKET EBOOK and/or SOFTBOOK (available from NUVOMEDIA, Inc., 310 Villa Street, Mountain View, Calif.) have attempted to provide devices and systems that attempt to more closely simulate the experience of reading an actual book. These devices are small and lightweight, like most books, magazines, and newspapers, but still do not provide the same experience as reading all of these types of publications. Because the screen size on the PDA's and ROCKET EBOOKS is relatively small, it is difficult to put an entire page of a newspaper or magazine on the screen of either of these devices. In addition, neither device permits the reader to see the entire page exactly as it appears in the conventional published document. Also, these devices have low resolution and use proprietary software and or proprietary Internet-based language requirements.
Another disadvantage of such devices is that publications made available on such devices must be translated and recomposed for their screens and systems. The ROCKET EBOOK, for example, calculates pages for each book depending on the font style, size and page orientation chosen. Because these factors make paging relative, the same book on different ROCKET EBOOK with different settings will have different page numbers. This feature, while acceptable for publications such as novels, is less satisfactory for publications having tables of contents, such as magazines and other periodicals. In addition, the page layout, colors, arrangement, illustrations, and even advertisements, form an integral part of the magazine's enjoyability and the convenience of the reading experience. These devices do not provide this type of experience during use.
One device that attempts to provide the experience of having the same format for reading books is called the EVERYBOOK, manufactured by EVERYBOOK, Inc., 2300 Vartan Way Harrisburg, Pa. The EVERYBOOK devices use existing print files from publishers and display them exactly as they would appear in print. One device offered by this manufacturer, called the EB Journal, offers full-page dual-screens, a color display, and provides storage for up to 200 fully illustrated reference books or 2,000 novels on each secure, removable storage card. To acquire content, users of the EVERYBOOK devices communicate directly with the content provider.